Chapins and Adams; 1700s Braintree, Mass., Can I get a scorecard?

Peaceful, quaint, religious Braintree Mass.(later a part of Quincy, Mass) seems to have been a hotbed of multiple marriages and family intermixing and basically a difficult web of knots to unravel. It appears the LDS does not have it quite correct yet. Adding the Bass (spelt Basse), Thayers, Paines, Faxon, and Wales families, the town is a fine representation of the Mayflower and Presidents families.

There is a group of well educated, and devout genealogist in the process of unraveling the knots at present. I am very pleased to find out about this group before my trip to England. Thankfully the group is not leaving any stone unturned, no hearsay, no assumptions or undocumented facts allowed. Many books have been written on these families, and in these books nearly every author has taken some degree of guessing or just omitted data completely. This project has been going on for over eight years now and every piece of documentation, published fact, record, family records is being compiled to come up with hopefully a more fact based genealogy of all these many children and who they married, and what children belonged to which families.

So how did I get involved in all of this??? Working on Randy Seavers 6 degrees of separation, I knew Abigail Adams was the aunt of President John Adams. Randy's Saturday Night fun for Genealogist was to track your family back to someone who may have known, spoke to, or shook the hand of First US President George Washington. I wanted to assure myself the facts were clear, and well established before I printed my findings. The facts were adding up to the fact that
Abigail Adams (born Feb 17, 1684) in Braintree, Mass to her mother, Mary Chapin Adams, and then decides to marry Seth Chapin. - but I did not realize how closely she was related to her husband. She was the first cousin of her husband and eight years his senior. All these families are intertwined like this! Therefore my original cry for a scorecard. But luckily we have database software programs that will allow us to show the twisted mess. I plan to color code the lineages and see how the tree?? (bush??) shakes out.

But once it is finished just as in some of my other lineages (like the Dearmans)we will have a well documented and precise tree.

Another genealogical pet-peeve of mine "accuracy versus precision". But that is another blog.....